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Social Scoring: How Is A Business Like A Sausage Factory?

Sausage factories and enterprises have a lot in common. Both take standard ingredients and add value, transforming them into an end product, more profitable than the parts.

And both work in opaque ways, raising questions about the palatability of what goes on behind those walls.

But that’s no longer good enough: This is the age of radical transparency…

Social media has become a ubiquitous channel of communication and marketing. Businesses that ignore it risk losing market share.

But the adoption of social media takes more than just adding one more marketing channel to a business. It requires a whole new set of marketing skills, an entirely different mindset, and a serious retooling of your internal setup.

Enterprise Mirrors Its Customers

No business can survive for long if it’s not in tune with its target market.

Business employees aren’t drones working in vacuum-sealed pods. They’re also consumers—somebody’s customers. As a result, they’re exposed to the same market forces and changing market environment as the people they’re targeting.

In the past, when consumers were isolated and businesses needed slickness to convince that they were trustworthy, a faceless, corporate approach worked. But in the social-media environment of the present, this achieves the exact opposite.

There’s always a direct link in the evolution of a business and its customers. Just like you wouldn’t send a lean, long-distance runner to wrestle with a tiger, it would make no sense to send a heavily-muscled gladiator to run a cheetah to ground.

The close mirroring of the environment that consumers now find themselves in is a fresh challenge that businesses need to face. The adoption of social media platforms like Yammer within enterprise walls is the first step in this transition.

Employees As Social Media Stars

Companies that implement social media intranets—Google is among them with an internal version of Google+ company-wide—find themselves facing the challenge of restructuring.

It’s impossible to set up a social media environment without also empowering employees to question policy decisions, air grievances, share knowledge, and actively look for ways to shorten long chains of command.

Behavior that we take for granted in a social media network, within the walls of a business, throws up as many fresh opportunities as challenges. This means employees now need to show that they’re adept at using social media. So, when hiring talent, HR needs to looks for new skillsets that help bridge the divide of the open, transparent marketplace and the more hierarchical one of the workplace.

The partnering of Yammer with Klout—the social-media scoring platform—is the first step towards formalizing the requirements needed in employees by enterprise. Those who are active in social-media platforms outside the company now have higher Klout scores and a potential career advantage inside of it.

This can change work/life balance: Employee activities outside the company used to be exclusively their own. It also makes “being social” a career requirement, subject to analysis and—more worryingly—gaming.

Four Simple Rules

So, for companies looking to capitalize on the social-media qualities of their employees—without running the risk of creating new leaderboards and a fresh set of problems—the rules are simple:

1. Create Transparency Klout scores and social-media wattage are OK, so long as everyone can see what you’re doing—both within the organization and outside it.

Transparency creates accountability, helps in the increased sharing of knowledge, and aids in the faster evolution of the enterprise.

2. Foster Trust You cannot regulate trust into a business. As it does in society, it has to arise naturally, by building relationships over time, the testing of advice, and the ability to challenge decisions.

Companies that achieve this, like Zappos, Google and Gore-Tex, find themselves able to act and move like nimble startups despite their large size.

3. Reward Knowledge Sharing Knowledge is power. Companies that implement social intranets frequently forget to do anything else. As a result, after the initial uptake, usage declines and employees go back to working in silos, looking for shortcuts to boost their careers.

4. Encourage Collaboration Within the enterprise walls, departments usually fight against each other. In the past this was seen as healthy competition, helping an enterprise discover the fittest employees.

We now know collaboration is a better way, marshalling resources and harnessing the cognitive surplus of employees to do something exceptional.

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